NAXOS | 8572167 | CD | 747313216772

Following their electrifying account of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony (8.572082), Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra explore the profound ambivalences of the composer’s most performed symphony, the Fifth, written in 1937 at a time when he was under intense personal and political pressure from the authorities. The jaunty, neo-classical character of the Ninth Symphony (1945) prompted Shostakovich to remark that ‘musicians will like to play it, and critics will delight in blasting it’. Shostakovich’s startlingly different original draft for the opening of the Ninth’s first movement is available on 8.572138.

Alongtime collaborator of John Adams and champion of his music, Marin Alsop directs this live recording of Opera Colorado’s 25th Anniversary Celebration production of Nixon in China, presented at Denver’s new Ellie Caulkins Opera House during the 2008 National Performing Arts Convention, and featuring an internationally recognized cast. Alice Goodman’s epic libretto and John Adams’s distinctive music weave together a colorful fabric of actual events from President Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic of China with intimate examinations of the opera’s real life characters. The spectacle, drama, humor and pathos of this masterpiece remain as compelling today as when the opera was premièred in 1987.

Somewhat unusually for a pianist-composer of his calibre, Taneyev wrote few works for that instrument alone, although each establishes its own memorable mood. The Violin Sonata, subtitled ‘Of medium difficulty’, belongs to his mature compositional period and is notable for its blend of technical virtuosity and meditative inwardness. The Theme and Variations pays tribute to Taneyev’s teacher and colleague Tchaikovsky. Several of the solo piano pieces here receive their world première recordings.

O Magnum Mysterium, O Nata Lux, Madrigali, Mid-Winter Songs

Morten Lauridsen is America’s preeminent composer of choral music. Characterized by long, arching and highly expressive lines, his works are enjoyed by performers and audiences worldwide. O nata lux, perhaps Lauridsen’s most popular work, is a serene evocation of heavenly light, while the searingly intense and technically demanding Madrigali inhabit a more feverish and earthy realm. The refined Les Chansons des Roses employ a design reminiscent of the formal gardens, filled with roses, found in the grounds of the great French châteaux. The unforgettable final movement is the now-famous Dirait-on. The Mid-Winter Songs for chorus and piano are a stunning example of compositional virtuosity. O magnum mysterium, for a cappella chorus, is a setting of a Christmas text that has inspired composers from Victoria to Poulenc.

Fourth of July, General Slocum, Overture in G minor

When asked to define a masterpiece in music Stravinsky chose Ives’s Decoration Day, a tone poem that Ives later made the second movement of his Holidays Symphony (its first movement, Washington’s Birthday, is available on Naxos 8.559087). The remaining movements also celebrate key American holidays with characteristic verve. The General Slocum movingly commemorates a 1904 boating disaster in which more than a thousand people lost their lives. The Overture and Postlude are early works that nonetheless display Ives’s originality, while Yale- Princeton Football Game exuberantly depicts a legendary 1897 match.

Often referred to as the ‘dean of African-American composers’, William Grant Still received many honours for his pioneering music for the concert platform, film and television. Still’s most distinctive works use African-American forms such as the blues, spirituals and jazz within a neo-romantic idiom. He declared that his Fourth Symphony was ‘intended to represent the spirit of the American people’, an idée fixe unifying its four contrasting movements into an appealing whole. His triumphant Fifth Symphony celebrates ‘the sharing of resources and achievements’ which the composer saw as the key to America’s greatness.

Ruo’s Chamber Concertos Nos. 1–4 (8.559322) was hailed as ‘a bold debut’ (Gramophone) which ‘shows a major compositional voice emerging’ (The Juilliard Journal Online). This disc, also conducted by the composer, presents three of his Drama Theaters for various combinations of Eastern and Western instruments – including 18 beer bottles – the elusive subtitle of each strikingly suggesting a musical/cultural/philosophical idea. Similarly, The Three Tenses explores a paradoxically integrated notion of time, where past, present and future create ‘a seamless entity called timelessness’. Huang Ruo won the 2008 International Composition Prize of the Luxembourg Society for Contemporary Music and has been cited by the New Yorker as ‘one of the most intriguing of the new crop of Asian-American composers.’

Richard Strauss’s orchestral music includes several works with autobiographical significance, including Ein Heldenleben (Naxos 8.554417). Scored for large symphony orchestra, the Symphonia domestica depicts the delights and vicissitudes of married life with Strauss, his wife, child and other family members deftly portrayed in a variety of situations, including a ‘cheerful quarrel’ in which the father has the last word! In contrast, Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings is Strauss’s heartbreaking meditation on the destruction of German culture during World War II.

Tiento, Si Le Jour Parait, Cadran Lunaire

The guitar music of North African composer Maurice Ohana, though indebted to Spanish culture, is far removed from any stereotypical Iberian aspects and, with the exception of Tiento, was written for the ten-string guitar as played by Narciso Yepes. Inspired by the possibilities of this newly developed instrument, Ohana’s imagination created a unique, complex and highly inventive musical language which makes immense demands on both player and listener. The enigmatic Si le jour paraît… is a seven-movement suite influenced by Debussy’s piano Préludes. Cadran lunaire (‘moon-dial’) juxtaposes ideas from classical antiquity, flamenco and traditional guitar music, conveyed through a rich variety of contrasts and moods.

Sonata for 2 Violins, Cello Sonata

While Ysaÿe’s Six Solo Violin Sonatas (Naxos 8.555996) remain his best known works, the Belgian virtuoso also composed other pieces which translate his thorough knowledge of the violin’s capabilities into thrilling music. The performance here of his Sonata for Two Violins is based on the composer’s autograph and that of the String Trio draws on the original hand-written parts. For the recording of the Cello Sonata the artist referred to Ysaÿe’s own fingering and bowing instructions. All three works display the composer’s dazzling mastery of technique and instrumental colour.

A colleague of Mendelssohn, the Schumanns and Brahms, the virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim was himself a composer of note. His exuberant single-movement Opus 3 Violin Concerto from around 1851 was dedicated to Liszt, from whom he subsequently distanced himself. It is a tour de force by a highly gifted twenty year old. The Opus 11 Violin Concerto followed six years later, its Classical three movements frequently coloured by Hungarian inflections, most strikingly in the ‘gypsy finale’ which calls for astonishing technical control, immense stamina and fiery abandon from the soloist. Suyoen Kim is the Winner of the 2006 Hannover International Violin Competition.

J.S. Bach’s famous Magnificat and that of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel were the templates for the teenage Mendelssohn’s first major work for soloists, chorus and full orchestra, a brilliant setting of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s song of praise, composed in 1822, floridly Baroque in conception and similar in scale to the Bach settings. His Ave Maria of 1830 again evokes Baroque splendour, but also points towards his later oratorios, Paulus and Elijah.

Poemes pour Mi, Les offrandes oubliees, Un sourire

Love and faith, mortality and eternity are the abiding themes of these three important and beautifully shimmering works by one of the 20th century’s most innovative composers. Les offrandes oubliées, Messiaen’s first published orchestral work, is a symphonic meditation on Christ’s loving sacrifice to redeem the sin of humanity. Poèmes pour Mi sets nine mystical texts which were written as highly personal love songs to his first wife, Claire Delbos, while Un sourire pays homage to what he saw as Mozart’s ever-smiling attitude to life’s many hardships.

Viva Sevilla, Airs Espagnol, Zigeunerweisen

Her recordings of Sarasate’s music for violin and piano (8.557767, 8.570192) have earned the young violinist Tianwa Yang praise for her ‘great polish and confidence’, American Record Guide describing her playing as ‘perfect’. This disc is her first volume of the Spanish virtuoso-composer’s music for violin and orchestra, a delightful survey of some of his most bewitching and demanding creations. Albert Spalding’s description of Sarasate’s playing could well apply to Tianwa Yang’s interpretations: ‘His violin sang like a thrush, and his incomparable ease tossed aside difficulties’.

Clarinet Sonata, Three Easy Pieces

The chamber music pieces on this disc show how richly satisfying Hindemith’s music can be. By turns passionate, deeply moving and humorous, each work which features the clarinet explores the wind instrument’s expressive potential, whether through lyrically arching melodies, passages of lilting innocence or fiery spirit. In the Three Easy Pieces for Cello and Piano Hindemith demonstrates mastery through restraint. Spectrum Concerts Berlin has also recorded two acclaimed discs of music by Hindemith’s contemporary and fellow exile Ernst Toch for Naxos (8.559324 and 8.559282).

Until recently the rôle of women as composers and performers of both sacred and secular music during the Middle Ages has been seriously underestimated. This disc, sung by the all-female group Musica Ficta, reveals how well suited to women’s voices are music from Notre-Dame in Paris and the songs of many trouvères (the northern counterparts of the troubadours of Languedoc). The latter songs, for instance, often feature female protagonists and present different perspectives on love and life to those by their male counterparts.

One of Milhaud’s finest and most expressive later scores, L’Amour chante sets poems on the subject of love by various poets, making of each a ‘novel within a sigh’. In the Poèmes juifs, whose anonymous texts Milhaud read in a magazine, the vocal line threads its way through myriad keys, creating subtle effects reminiscent of Fauré or Debussy. Alissa, based on a novel by André Gide, completes this survey of the cream of Milhaud’s output for voice and piano.

Carl Rütti’s choral music is ‘sensuous and exuberant by turns, combining dazzling rhythms and soaring melodies with distinctively lush harmonies’ (Choir & Organ magazine). Of his Requiem, immense in scale yet often intimate in tone, the composer writes that ‘no words are strong enough to express the feelings of the bereaved, nor sufficient to explain what will await us after death. Music may be the most appropriate language’. Scored for soprano, baritone, double choir, strings, harp and organ, Rütti’s Requiem ultimately affirms life’s precious fragility.

First performed at Versailles in 1745, the opera ballet Zélindor is a delightful rococo pastorale which found favour with Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, no doubt because its story about a king who loves a commoner reflected her own situation. Opera Lafayette’s 2007 revival was hailed as “brilliant” by The Washington Post, which praised the soloists, headed by Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, and chamber chorus who “sang with a gusto matched by the orchestra’s rhythmic pungency”. This is the work’s world première recording with full orchestra and chorus.

Tavener, Adams, Rzewski, Lindberg, Takemitsu, Ives, Bolcom, Messiaen

NAXOS AUDIOBOOKS | 197412 | CD | 9789626349748

A terrifying ghost is haunting the ancient mansion of Canterville Chase, complete with creaking floorboards, clanking chains and gruesome disguises - but the new occupants seem strangely undisturbed by his presence. Deftly contrasting the conventional gothic ghost story with the pragmatism of the modern world, Wilde creates a gently comic fable of the conflict between old and new. Rupert Degas’s hilarious reading brings the absurdity and theatricality of the story to life.

A dark night, a graveyard and the suspicion of murder... The Body Snatchers is one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s most chilling tales. After many years, a chance encounter between two former medical students forces them to recall their sinister past and foul play that was better left buried. Perfect for long winter nights, these stories have been specially selected to create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. Read by Roy McMillan, with Naxos AudioBooks’s trademark of carefully chosen music.

This is the third in Edith Nesbit’s ever-popular ‘Treasure Seekers’ series, after The Treasure Seekers and The Wouldbegoods. This classic children’s tale brings back the much-loved characters of Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel and H.O. Bastable as they stumble into yet more comic adventures. Teresa Gallagher read the previous two books in this highly praised series and returns to recount more japes in her colourful array of children’s voices.

NAXOS DVD | NBD000104 | BR4 | 730099000161

Keyboardist/musicologist Tom Beghin, record producer Martha de Francisco, and acoustical architect Wieslaw Woszczyk have joined forces to apply ‘virtual acoustics’ for the first time to a commercial recording of this magnitude: a complete recording of Haydn’s works for solo keyboard. More than fourteen hours of music are performed in nine “virtual rooms.” These are actual rooms where Haydn or a typical player of his keyboard music would have performed. They have been acoustically sampled, electronically mapped, then precisely recreated in the recording studio. Featured rooms range from the most private to the most public, from Haydn’s own study in his Eisenstadt home to the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, England. Further enhancing this unique experience of the Haydn repertoire are the seven historical keyboards on which the music is performed. All seven instruments, from a 1760s clavichord to a 1798 English grand piano, were built for this project by today’s leading artisans.